One out of Eight

A machine designed to kill people who theoretically "need killin'" kills one bystander for every seven who -possibly- deserved it. How is this justifiable?

One out of eight. Keep that figure in mind for a moment.

It ought to be a rule that for any state-sanctioned execution to proceed, anyone who could possibly prevent it or could have prevented it by signing a single document or proclaiming a different sentence or verdict or ruling has to be in the room with it while it occurs, with their finger holding down a button, simultaneously with all of the others, for ten whole minutes, that indicates their desire for the execution to proceed. And if anyone's finger comes off their button, it stops and never happens. If there was a group involved, then they all get a single indicator that is extinguished when enough of them have lifted their respective fingers.

Everyone who wants to prevent the execution should also be allowed in an adjacent room with a large glass window so that their faces can be seen.

At no point should we allow an implacable, unstoppable system to proceed with the pointless murder of a human being due to "flaws in the process."

In the world of commercial products, if someone creates a machine that kills people, even if it is a machine that is designed for murder and it kills the wrong people, it is our duty to hold the designers and manufacturers and operators of that machine responsible for each death and require that machine to cease operation until it can be redesigned, redeployed more safely, and operated by people with better training and failsafes.

This machine has killed at bare minimum 200 individuals who were exonerated of their supposed crimes since 1973. Fourteen hundred others have also been killed by this machine since then—and who knows how many of them were also innocent, or perhaps only guilty of lesser crimes than the capital crimes of which they were convicted? Regardless, this machine has a KNOWN MINIMUM ERROR RATE OF 12.5%.

One of every eight people executed has been exonerated postmortem.

What the @$!& kind of error rate is that for a machine designed to have lethal capacity? That's basically a drive-by shooting with the rate that it drops bystanders. Except ponderously slow and hideously expensive.

Not that money should enter into it, being math that concerns the life or death of innocent people, but lifetime incarceration costs about 5% of a fully functional and suitable reformed death penalty system. Just saying.

But until we apply those suitable reforms—or do away with the death penalty altogether—everyone who is operating this #^@&ed up machine needs to be in the room actively participating in that death, visible to all of those who oppose it, and held personally responsible for it, to be held severally and jointly responsible for that unjustifiable death in the event of yet another inevitable exoneration.

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